A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens (1859)
“The most famous opening in English prose introduces a story where a drunken wastrel chooses death so the man he envies can live — and makes you believe every word of it.”
Language Register
High Victorian formal — Latinate, periodic sentences, rhetorical flourish, biblical cadence in key passages
Syntax Profile
Dickens uses anaphora systematically — repeated syntactic structures create rhythm and emphasis. The famous opening is the purest example, but the technique appears throughout: 'It was the...' constructions, 'I see...' in Carton's final vision, the paired oppositions that mirror the novel's duality theme. Sentence length varies dramatically by emotional register: crowd scenes use long, accumulating clauses; crisis moments use short, declarative sentences. The periodic sentence — where meaning is suspended until the end — is Dickens's primary suspense tool.
Figurative Language
Very high — Dickens uses metaphor and personification at a density unusual even for Victorian prose. The Revolution is a flood, a fire, a storm, a sea. The guillotine is a woman. Madame Defarge's knitting is fate itself. The figurative language is not decoration but argument: Dickens uses metaphor to make abstract historical forces feel physically present.
Era-Specific Language
Generic title for French aristocracy — used as collective noun, signaling the class as undifferentiated mass
French for 'formerly' — used to describe aristocrats stripped of title by the Revolution
Body snatcher — Victorian slang for those who supplied corpses to medical schools
Madame Defarge's lieutenant — given a title rather than a name, signaling abstraction of individual into ideology
Code name for revolutionary cell members — a real historical term from pre-Revolutionary France
Personified as female throughout — 'the National Razor,' 'the sharp female'
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Sydney Carton
Educated, sardonic, self-lacerating. Uses complex subordinate clauses and long sentences when sober; clipped, bitter monosyllables when drunk. His language is always more precise than his circumstances suggest.
A gentleman's education in service of a wasted life. Carton's verbal intelligence is his tragedy — he is articulate enough to see exactly what he has thrown away.
Charles Darnay
Formal, careful, slightly stiff. His English has the precision of a man who learned it as a second language of escape. He avoids the rhetorical flourish that marks native speakers performing class.
An aristocrat performing middle-class respectability. His language is correct but never quite at ease — the speech of a man who has translated himself.
Lucie Manette
Warm, direct, emotional — Dickens's idealized feminine register. She speaks in complete feelings rather than complete thoughts. Her language is affective rather than rhetorical.
The Victorian ideal of domestic femininity — language as emotional expression rather than social performance. Lucie's directness is moral clarity in speech form.
Madame Defarge
Sparse, declarative, without ornament. She speaks in verdicts, not arguments. Her knitting speaks louder than her words — she encodes where others discourse.
Power that has abandoned persuasion. Madame Defarge speaks little because she has already decided. Her silence is more terrifying than her speech.
Dr. Manette
Two registers: the measured professional voice of his restored self, and the terrifying dissociation of his Bastille relapse — 'One Hundred and Five, North Tower' repeated in a trance.
Trauma as a second language. The Bastille voice interrupts the recovered voice whenever the original wound is reopened. Manette's psychological state is legible in his diction.
Jerry Cruncher
Cockney vernacular — dropped h's, fractured grammar, malapropisms. His son mimics him constantly, amplifying his verbal errors. 'Flopping' (praying) becomes his great complaint against his wife.
Working-class London rendered comedically but not condescendingly. Cruncher is honest in his dishonesty — his vernacular is the language of the novel's most transparently self-aware character.
Narrator's Voice
Dickens as omniscient Victorian narrator — intrusive, rhetorical, morally present. Unlike Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway, Dickens's narrator makes no pretense of objectivity. He addresses the reader directly ('I pause to ask you'), delivers political judgments openly, and uses the first person plural ('we') to draw reader and narrator into shared historical witness. The narrator is not a character but a perspective — a mid-19th-century English liberal conscience viewing both the ancien régime and the Terror with equal horror.
Tone Progression
Book I — Recalled to Life
Gothic, atmospheric, mysterious
Night coach journeys, buried men, shadowed wine shops. Dickens establishes dread before he establishes plot.
Book II — The Golden Thread
Warm, darkening, elegiac
The London domestic idyll, the Paris political gathering storm. The warmth is deliberate — Dickens needs readers to love what they're about to lose.
Book III — The Track of the Storm
Violent, urgent, visionary
Revolutionary Paris, the tribunal, the prison. The prose accelerates toward the guillotine and then opens into prophetic vision at the end.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Victor Hugo's Les Misérables — contemporary, same Revolutionary subject matter, opposite method: Hugo lingers, Dickens compresses
- Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution — Dickens's primary historical source; the prose influence of Carlyle's rhetorical style is direct
- Dickens's own Great Expectations — more psychologically intimate, less politically schematic, written the same year
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions